I reflect on these wise words of our Holy Father regarding the upkeep of a good garden as I sit here in my Office while the remnants of the first tropical storm of the 2013 hurricane season quickly approaches a city that in many ways is still struggling to recover from some of the devastation wrought by one of the final storms of last year. Of all of the many lessons that Sandy has taught those of us living in the metropolitan area, one of the greatest is just how dangerous an over-abundance of water can be, even to the most modern of cities. Many folks who live outside the city sometimes fail to realize that most of the City of New York is actually composed of a series of islands (in fact – the beautiful Bronx is the only area physically connected to the mainland United States). I think that living in places surrounded by water which, at the time, seemed to always stay within the concrete, wood and steel covered banks that contained it, inured many New Yorkers to the inherent power and danger of both storms and the sea: disastrous floods were something that happened to other people, in other places, far more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of Mother Nature… New York was too big –too modern – to have such worries. Hurricane Sandy changed all of that thinking, if not permanently, certainly for the lifetimes of those of us who lived through her most unwelcome visit to our otherwise welcoming city, and I assure you: I am not the only person in these parts who take the bleating “severe weather alerts” on my smartphone which now precede the approach of any major storm just that much more seriously.

The natural world can be a very fickle place, and just as it is often said that one man’s trash is another’s treasure, a natural element like water, for example, that in one place in overabundance can be a pestilence, can – in another circumstance- be as precious as gemstones. In a few days time, I will be traveling down to Tucson, Arizona for a work conference focused upon Catholic Teaching and migration. In making this journey from here in the Archdiocese of New York down to our sister Diocese on the Mexican border,I will be traveling down from an area in which many victims of storm and sea are still struggling seven months later to rebuild their lives, to a hotter and drier place being impacted by a drought so severe it covers over half of the continental United States (much of it exacerbated by growing agricultural, industrial and urban demands in those water stressed areas.)

Too much or too little – feast or famine –water, heat, storms, sea level…. it seems that in almost no place in our time of extremes do we ever anymore hear of anyplace where weather and living conditions are – in the comforting words of the fairy tale read to us as children – “…just right.”…. and perhaps in all this there is a lesson.

As some of you readers will be aware, this blog post has been a long time in coming; the reason I know that some of you are aware of this is because several of you have been kind enough to contact me and let me know that you appreciate reading some of my musings on here, as well as very appropriately chiding me that, to use your own words, “February 7th“– the date of my last posting – “seems like a longgg time” to be silent….and certainly you are correct in this observation. It’s not that things have been quiet either here or around the globe over the past quarter of a year, and certainly not for me personally or professionally. In the past three months I have – in no particular order – become an uncle for the second time, celebrated my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, led delegations to Washington and Albany in support of the dignity of the human person, and had yet another of my increasingly significant number of birthdays. Just as certainly, in Church circles, things have not been “business as usual” either, as Pope Benedict XVI’s s once in a millennium resignation, and Pope Francis’s now three month reign of successive “Papal firsts”, easily demonstrate.No, in all of this time there has been such a succession of items worth comment on that my lack of commentary on any requires not just an apology, but also an explanation.

You see, despite being inundated with waves of information, of activity, of responsibility and experiences, inside – where the words come from – I was feeling at many times not deluge, but drought. The reasons for this are many, but I think a significant magnifier of this parched feeling for me came from a reluctant recognition on my part of the intransigence of wickedness in our world. It was caused by no particular event I can point a finger at but instead was cumulative, born of the litany of any of the recent affronts to human decency and dignity, be it the grisly horrors that Dr. Kermit Gosnell - and those like him – visit upon vulnerable women and their unborn children in a houses of horroreuphemistically advertized as places of healing, to our increasingly sclerotic government’s failure to enact legislation which could help to keep personal “weapons of mass destruction” out of the hands of those who would wreak havoc on the lives of the innocent in the now 6 month aftermath of Sandy Hook, tothe return to these shores of the fundamentalist terror that plagues to many places in this world, blasphemously profaning the name of God for whom it has been allegedly committed. All of these – and several more – brought me to a place where for a time I felt a terrible surrender, where the words could not form, where my “glass is half full” worldview felt very, very empty.

Nature as they say abhors a vacuum, and just as the parched earth longs for the rain to restore to life to its hardened and cracked surface, as a Christian I knew that I could not remain in a dry, dead place: Jesus is Risen! He is alive and our well-spring! As Scripture reminds us, He came into the world so that we“might have life and have it more abundantly”. The place that we are called to occupy as Christians is not a life-threatening place of drought, but a life-giving place of hope. It’s not that – like in those stories told to us as children – the world around us, and everyone living within it, are going to all be forever “just right”, and live “happily ever after”. The Gospel is not a fairy tale, and Jesus came not to sugar-coat the world, but to redeem it.What the Resurrection means is not that wickedness and death have ceased to exist; it’s that they cannot – and do not – have the final say: goodness and life and truth win in the end. It is in this belief that Christian hope is born and sustained, and the markers of this hope are made manifest all around us every day if we only take the care to notice. God is always present in our lives; we only have to take a closer look. In the past couple of months while I was in that place where the words would not come, God was there with me, reminding me the whole time that He makes all things new with the birth of my beloved nephew, that He is forever faithful in the Fifty years of marriage that my parents just celebrated, and that He is and remains my friend in the wonderful camaraderie I shared on my birthday with many friends, from many places, who call God by many names.

Liturgically in the Church, we are right now in what is known as “Ordinary Time”, when the Easter Season commemorating Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascensions into heaven is completed. I think that another way to see this period of Sundays leading up to the season of Advent is as a “season of Pentecost” , and extraordinary time when God’s Holy Spirit – promised by Jesus prior to His Ascension and received by the disciples that first Pentecost Sunday – is alive and active in the world, allowing we Christian – and indeed all people of good will – to live in a climate of hope. It is up to us – despite the wickedness that we may still see around us – to recognize this, and – in the words of Our Holy Father Pope Francis that opened up this blog post – to bring water to the parched earth and cause “the world to grow responsibly, transforming it so that it may be a garden, a habitable place for everyone.”

Sorry about the little delay in posting, but like so many others lately I have been – if you’ll pardon the ubiquitous pun – a little “pre-occupied”.

In this pre-“occupation” I am seemingly in good – and teaming – company. Whether one counts themselves among the under-employed, debt-ridden and under-insured members of the 99% of the “Occupy the–Fill-in-the Blank Movement”, the over-worked and over-taxed 53%, the 18th Century Costume Wearing over-regulated Tea Party Movement, or even the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace at the Vatican in Rome; it seems that just about every-body lately is pre-occupied thinking and talking and complaining about the dismal state of the global financial system. While there is no unanimity amongst those complaining about the state of the world’s finances on how to best fix what is wrong, there definitely seems to be a consensus that things are seriously awry and that we need corrective action – sooner as opposed to later.

I actually went down a number of weeks ago with a friend to visit Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and see for myself the goings on at the “Occupy Wall Street” Movement’s (or OWS) ground zero as it were. I had been reading a lot about the protests for several weeks from various sources, and I wanted to see for myself exactly what was going on that was sparking so much interest across the globe. What I witnessed there was a collection of people – from various walks of life and different age groups – who felt significant alienation from the direction that their society was taking, as well as a certain inability to control the powerful forces that were shaping society in what they felt to be very detrimental ways. To a certain extent, these “Occupiers” – although politically far removed from the conservative Tea Party Movement – were united with that other movement in a spirit of disenfranchisement: feeling that the world is changing in fundamental ways that are beyond the abilities of ordinary people – the 99% if you will – to control. This is certainly a feeling that I in my more despairing moments could commiserate with, and because of this feeling I – for one – was not surprised when the “Occupy Movement” sprouted legs and wings and spread to over 900 cities across the globe.

I will blog more about OWS and the events in Zuccotti Park in future posts, but for now I’d actually like to tell you a bit about another place in lower Manhattan – one of my favorite spots in the city actually, and a place only about 4 or 5 blocks west of where OSW is located – on the banks of the Hudson River in a small park located in Battery Park City. It is there that you will find New York City’s memorial to the great Irish famine that occurred from 1845 to 1852 – which began with a blighted potato crop and was exacerbated by a confluence of political inaction that increased an already desperate situation. Fully one-third of the people living in Ireland at that time – one half million – died of starvation, and another third – of whom I am a living descendant – emigrated in a great diaspora out to any ports that would welcome them all over the world. The memorial itself is beautiful: a rugged half-acre of cantilevered landscape thickly planted with native Irish flora and plants growing in fallow fields, along with the remains of an authentic, famine era Irish cottage; beneath is a stratified base of glass and fossilized Irish limestone that creates a space where accounts of historical and contemporary sentiments about hunger world-wide are etched in the glass and broadcast from an audio installation overhead. All in all, this space does what memorials at their best are supposed to do: it raises public awareness about an event that happened long ago that led to the Irish Famine of 1845-52, while encouraging its viewers to address the causes of current and future hunger world-wide.

Hunger has been in my thoughts a lot lately, primarily because for the past week I – along with our Executive Director Msgr. Kevin Sullivan and several of my colleagues here at Catholic Charities – have been participating in “The Food Stamp Challenge”, an annual campaign sponsored by the “Fight Poverty with Faith” Mobilization – of which Catholic Charities USA is a partnering organization – which ran between October 27th to November 6th; the goal of the Food Stamp Challenge is to encourage participants to live for one week on the average national benefit given to those who are on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which roughly translates to approximately $31.50 per week, or $4.50 a day. Let me tell you – that’s not a lot of money…especially here in New York City, and its not easy to restrict your shopping budget for a week to what many of us might pay for a single meal in a restaurant. Being on such a restricted budget certainly presented it’s challenges, but armed with a shopping list and a calculator, I set out to the supermarket to plan out my meals for the week returning with staples that consisted mostly of oatmeal (store variety), brown rice, frozen vegetables and on sale chunk light tuna (in water of course!) These were the mainstays of my diet & accept for a Saturday night treat of a 10-piece McNugget (no fries or soda); I pretty much stayed to the challenge, winding up with just under $5.00 by weeks end. During the challenge – while I have to admit that I was not REALY every truly “pangs in the stomach” hungry – what I can tell you is that the cuisine I was eating left me definitely uninspired. While oatmeal (made with water and no milk), dry canned tuna, brown rice and frozen chopped carrots, beans, corn and peas might be healthy, they are not the tastiest things to eat on a daily basis. In fact, to give myself a little flavor, I used to use packets of soy sauce I had saved from Chinese take-out and add it to the brown rice and vegetables – that definitely gave it a flavor, with all that sodium, I shudder to consider what my blood pressure must be now!

All in all though, I am glad that I have taken the challenge, and I certainly do not want to complain: it seems to me that there is something unseemly about complaining about a situation that you voluntarily take on in order to attempt to understand the reality that others live but have little choice about. In fact, the past week’s experiences reminded me a little of the time that I spent in Africa last September, when we were staying in some of the guest houses with larger groups of people back in Tanzania. Often, the dinner meals that were served were put out at one time to feed all who were staying there, and we would all line up cafeteria style to serve ourselves from whatever was being prepared. I almost always found myself at the end of the line, and sometimes when I got to the front, whatever the meat that was being served was gone, and all that was left was white rice and sauerkraut (not a favorite), which I would combine on my plate and eat because I was hungry. Then – as with last week – I found after eating such a meal that I definitely was not hungry, but also not fully satisfied either; and yet – then as now – I did not complain about my meal because having been in Ethiopia in the days before – to witness first-hand the tremendous work that Catholic Relief Services does to provide food assistance to that drought ravaged region in the Horn of Africa – it would have been not only unseemly but obscene to do so.

The Food Stamp Challenge this year comes at a time of great challenge to our financially-strapped nation and its historic moral commitment to feed the hungry at home and abroad. As many of you are aware – in an effort to address the burgeoning budget crisis here at home, the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is working on producing a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion dollars; the day that this deficit reduction plan is due is – ironically – the day before Thanksgiving. Many anti-hunger advocates are concerned that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food stamp assistance to those struggling to put a meal on the table might be a target for massive funding cuts. In addition, another area that appears to be ripe for budget cutters is slashing financing for the State Department and its related agencies – this at a time of desperate humanitarian crises across the world; life saving, poverty-focused international assistance that fights hunger, disease and poverty makes up less then 1% of the U.S. Federal Budget, and yet the Unites States Senate is currently looking to drastically cut this funding. Sadly, it seems clear that reducing the federal deficit by 1% will not balance the federal budget; in fact, the one thing that such action seems certain to do – at a time that 12 million people in East Africa are facing malnutrition and starvation – is cost lives.

Through my work, I have been blessed to witness how such U.S. government assistance helps Catholic Relief Services and other similar agencies quite literally save live overseas, and how back home similar assistance helps Catholic Charities ensure that the families of those trying to make ends meet don’t have to literally skip meals as they struggle to pay their bills from month to month. In a recently published book “Three Famines: Starvation and Politics” about three of the greatest famines in history: the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, the Bengal famine in India in 1943-44, and the Ethiopian famines of the 1970s & 80s, author Thomas Keneally writes persuasively about how politics helps to turn a crop failure into a famine. As Keneally notes, famine is caused less by a failure to produce food then it is by a failure to distribute food correctly – mostly because those in power feel they are not accountable to the starving. Unfortunately today, the hungry do not have a large and vocal constituency: and that’s where we come in!

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services are both now currently advocating with both houses of Congress and the Administration to ensure that needed hunger-related assistance – both international and domestic – is not compromised in the current deficit reduction debate; to add your voice to these efforts please press the links here and follow the related instructions; in this way you can help to ensure that the words of the Lord in the Gospel are made manifest when he said to “give the people something to eat”. After all, for Christians feeding the hungry is not some peripheral “nice thing” that we should do if we’ve got the time – its literally part of our “final exam” that Jesus told us about on the Sermon on the Mount, along with clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger and caring for the ill. Since we already know what we are to be graded on, there is really no excuse for us to get this one wrong. In fact, no less an authority then the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, in his message for World Food Day back on October16th went so far as to say that “liberation from the yoke of hunger is the first concrete manifestation of the right to life, which – despite its having been solemnly proclaimed – is often very far from being fulfilled effectively.” Its up to us to remedy this situation – to ensure that what has been solemnly proclaimed is fulfilled effectively…….While the rest of the world’s attention is focused on the 99% fighting the alleged evils of the top 1%, with the 53% somewhere in the middle, lets be sure that our attention is focused on the 15% who live here below the poverty level – and the much larger percentage of our brothers and sisters who do across our world.

Ciao, dear readers. I apologize for the longish interlude between this post and my last, but one of the things that I have been doing in the interim was spending two magnificent weeks with my family and friends in the beautiful country of Italy. Traveling as one of the almost 200 who made the journey to Rome to witness our new shepard, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, receive the pallium of his office as Archbishop from Pope Benedict XVI back on June 29th (link), I really feel as if my time there was as much a pilgrimage as a vacation. My very first trip to Rome, I can’t begin to tell you the excitement I felt as I walked up the broad boulevard of the Via Della Conciliazione on that bright sunny morning and got my first glimpse of the iconic dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica. As I walked further down that broad street built by Mussolini and entered past the curving majesty of Bernini’s Colonnade to enter St. Peter’s Square, I was struck with the fact that – despite its immenseness size – the church itself did not overwhelm me; instead, I felt the beauty of the space and the Mass (link) welcome me – the sweep of the Colonnade on either side of me feeling like the arms of a friend reaching out in a warm embrace, the beautiful music, prayers and song lifting my spirit like the words of a dear loved one. Although far from New York, I felt right at home – and being able to sharing the Sign of Peace and the Eucharist with so many fellow Catholics from all over the world brought the universality of the Church and its teachings on Solidarity home to me in ways I had never quite experienced before. This tremendous feeling of welcome was only magnified later that day after the Mass when we were able to attend the reception held at the North American College for the five U.S. Archbishops who received the pallium along with Archbishop Dolan; from the hospitality shown by the seminarians to the warm greeting that our new Shepard extended to everyone who came up to congratulate him, the experiences of that day will stay in my memory forever.

Because tradition dictates that Archbishops receive the pallium on the Feast Day of Saints Peter and Paul (June 29), it was unfortunately necessary for me to be out of the country this year for the Fourth of July. Generally, I don’t like to be away on Independence Day – I’m a real lover of all of the pomp and patriotism that holiday represents (not to mention the fireworks and my Dad’s barbeques!) I remembered the last time we were out of the country for the Fourth we were – somewhat ironically – in England for the holiday. At the time, when we had gone out to supper at the local pub, we thought it wise not to be too demonstrative in our celebration lest we raise a potentially sore subject to our hosts. We, of course, could not have been more mistaken – once our hostess had figured out that we were from the States, we were overwhelmed with well-wishers who made a particular point to come over and chat with the folks from one of the “thirteen rebellious colonies”, making that one of our most memorable Fourth of July’s ever. I kept wondering what the celebration of the Fourth in Italy would be like – would there be similar well-wishers, would there be fireworks along the Tiber River the way there was along the East River back home (only perhaps in red, white and green as opposed to the traditional colors). As Independence Day came in Italy – and the hot, dry day turned into a cool, clear night – I looked up to the night sky and saw no fireworks: only the beautifully lit dome of Saint Peter’s reflected in the river and the stars twinkling above. Instead of the traditional loud noises and the oohhhs and aaahhs of the crowd, there was only silence, broken occasionally by the whine of a vespa’s engine carrying it’s owner home after a days work. I was actually grateful for this silence: it gave me the opportunity to prayerfully contemplate the day’s meaning in ways that if I were at home I probably never would have. As I stared out of Saint Peter’s – dominating the Roman skyline – I thought of some significant similarities between my home in New York and the Eternal City: both considered “empire” cities, both perceived as at the pinnacle of their respective cultures, both attacked in uncivilized manners because of their perceived importance – and yet, both these great cities survived and carried on. Of course there are some very profound differences as well – Rome is well over 2,000 years old with ruins and monuments of multiple civilizations all over the city, the facades of its buildings sturdy, solid, low and old, where as New York is barely over 400 years old, the facades of its buildings tall, sleek, shiny and new, and where squabbles are still take place about what the appropriate monument should be at the construction site in lower Manhattan where our most terrible tragedy occurred – and only within this decade.

Thinking about these two great cities on Independence Day – and their similarities and differences – got me thinking about two significant components of my personality that evening: I thought first of Rome – of its age, its enduring nature and permanence – the arms of the Bernini Colonnade reaching out – and then I thought of our Roman Catholic faith. Following up on this, I then thought of “home” – of New York and America – the spires of our skyscrapers reaching up, our nation’s relative newness and promise in the family of nations, our love of freedom and our American pragmatism and the opportunity for a new life that she extends to newcomers. As I contemplated these two major “components” of what makes me authentically “me”, I was awash with gratitude that God had allowed me the blessing to be born in these circumstances – as a Catholic and an American – and at this time. There are those who would view being born into either of these circumstances as more of an affliction then a blessing: on one side, those who view the ancient moral and social teachings of the Church as “out of date” and “oppressive”, on the other, those who see America as an amoral nation awash in licentiousness. Frankly, I think that people who view matters this way have misunderstood the nature of our God-given gift of human freedom, and the tremendous responsibility that this gift imparts us with. As Americans, we are wonderfully blessed – by our Constitutional rights to free speech, religious liberty, to assembly, to petition our government – to have a unique opportunity shape our nation’s policies and laws through our democratic institutions. These rights of course, impose upon us considerable responsibility. Our previous Pope, the great John Paul II, said it best in the homily he gave at Orioles Park in 1995 when he said, “America has always wanted to be a land of the free. Today, the challenge facing America is to find freedom’s fulfillment in the truth: the truth that is intrinsic to human life created in God’s image and likeness, the truth that is written on the human heart, the truth that can be known by reason and can therefore form the basis of a profound and universal dialogue among people and the direction they must give to their lives and their activities…it is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”(link)

While I was in Rome, the two most powerful representatives of these “bookends” of my personal make-up met on July 10: Pope Benedict XVI and President Barack Obama (link). Many in the media on both sides of the Atlantic thought – because of fundamental disagreements on the meaning of human life and dignity – that this meeting would be confrontational, a veritable clash of the titans, with a winner leaving victorious and a looser vanquished. Instead, the meeting was cordial and genial – the two world leaders discussed matters of great importance: concerns of social justice, disarmament, the Middle East and Cuba, as well as violations of the dignity of human life like stem cell research and abortion. At the conclusion of the meeting, the Pope gave President Obama a copy of the document “Dignitas Personae” (link) – which explains in detail the Church’s defense of life from conception until natural death, and urged the President to read it. In doing so, the Pope demonstrated that he correctly understands the nature of human freedom. Through his appeal to the President as one man to another the Pope was showing that we authentically exercise God’s gift of freedom – “the right to do what we ought” – through ongoing engagement and reasoning together person to person. It is a responsibility that all Baptized Catholics share, and it’s a lesson that we all sorely need to learn today – on both sides of the Atlantic.